[Essay Parts Kits
Amancio Mccrae
Here, "inaccessible" not only refers to the fact that noVictorian electro-mobile jewelry exists in functioning form (Gere and Rudoe 2010, 213). It also accounts for extant instances ofthe jewelry, none of which functions, is readily available for handling, or canbe fully digitized. Indeed, with early wearables,there are many occlusions. Their interiors are obscured. Parts and wholes aremissing. Manufacturing conditions are mysterious. Use cultures are spectral.Mechanisms are found only on paper.
These are absences common to the Kits, which identify whatwe cannot experience or know for certain, to then prototype speculations aboutthe past. These speculations establish indexical relations with history. Theyproduce a tangible "that" for warranting and reference: tactile manifestationsof abductive reasoning and assumption (Peirce 1901,1955). They are attempts to recover, repair, and re-contextualize the stuff ofhistory.
Even when held in hand, these prototypes are conceptual.They are clearly not sourced from from anothercentury. They correspond with the past from the present: three-axis hypotheseswithout much dust or age. Being prototypes, they are also frozen gestures. Theydemand a supplement. They invite explanation or addition.
As amusement, the Kits are elliptical in their assertionsabout culture and history. They divert and distract. They entertainpossibilities through procedures, with an honestyabout what they cannot prove, capture, or reproduce but are neverthelesswilling to conjecture (Kraus 2009, para. 4). They area touch anachronistic as well, employing today's gadgets to remake yesterday'snovelties (Sayers 2015). Examples include the use of computer-aidedmanufacturing to fabricate components of those early wearablesmentioned moments ago. Assembling these components into a functioning prototypebecomes a line of inquiry: a series of choices for translating this into that.Even as a process, this assembly is material. To ask "what if?" here and nowrequires arrangement and memory. Decisions are made, and there is always asetting, with participants and conditions.
As with any Fluxkit, the Kits arearranged and distributed in tactile boxes, usually made of wood. The wood islaser-cut, and the boxes often have drawers and compartments. Their design is intended to correspond, at least in part,with their time period, their object of inquiry, or both. Thus a box for anEarly Wearable Kit may resemble a Victorian jewelry box, or its surface may beengraved with the signature of the wearable's original designer.
However, the boxes' relation to history is not mimetic. Theyare not replicas or reproductions. They foreground how the past is interpretedthrough present conditions, exhibiting history as a collection of refreshedtraces, with both loss and gain: a signature is cropped from a digital image ofan illustration dated 1863 and then fed through a laser cutter, which burns theVictorian autograph onto birch. Remediation and change are fundamental to thisprocedure and its transduction of history into Kit form (Bolter and Grusin 1999).
The boxes also draw from the mechanical arts, or from theintersection of function and aesthetics. They are practical. And they are notat all. Resonating with a Fluxus absorption in theeveryday, their design is conducive to batch manufacturing. They are meant tobe multiples. Yet they structure content deliberately. Images frequentlyignored by media studies may be printed, rolled, fastened with elastic, and tuckedinto a hidden compartment. Or a prototype's component parts may be placed on abox's top tier, above the contextual materials stored in the bottom tier,hinting at what is typically overlooked by historical accounts. As audiencesremove these materials and arrange them for interpretation, they may becomeaware of how the box's design tacitly asserts itself.
Recalling Dick Higgins's notion of "intermedia,"the unpacking process may spark questions such as, "'what that I know does thisnew work lie between?'" (2001, 53). Between containerand essay? Guide and argument? Boxand book? This between state destabilizes the default states ofmaterials in a given Kit, resisting the efficiency, optimization, andcomprehensiveness associated with modular, "kit-of-parts" construction, wherethe parts are treated as discrete components of a coherent system with adefined purpose that is often represented through a 3-D model (Perner-Wilson 2011, 6).
With the Kits, repair is intertwined with prototyping. Eachbox includes a prototype in tactile form. Every prototype is provided induplicate: one version is assembled, and the other is not. This way, audiencessee and handle a prototype in distinct iterations, and they make decisionsrelated to assembly. Aside from materials such as wire and batteries, allcomponent parts are made specifically for the Kits using a blend of manual andcomputer numerical control (CNC) tools. Popular materials for manufacturinginclude acrylic, foam, wood, paper, and biodegradable thermoplastic. Often, aKit contains several prototypes of the same mechanism. For instance, one earlywearable piece may assume four different versions in a single Kit.
Versioning old media underscores how objects could havemanifested differently, in ways that frequently escape documentation, illustrations,patents, reviews, and mass production. To variously articulate component partsis to demonstrate how technologies are constructed, replete with editorialdecisions, and subject to change and alteration over time. Versioning alsoemphasizes how objects are congealed processes: decisions that facilitate andimpede more decisions; labor conducive and resistant to more labor.
In the Kits, matter cannot be abstracted from situatedpractice. Rehearsing the Fluxist critique of thedisembodied eye, hand, and ear, the prototypes assert the role embodiment playsin interpretation. Returning for a moment to Hannah Higgins, the Fluxkits "[offer] a primary experience of matter as art" (2002,37). Like other Fluxus work(including Fluxfilms), Fluxkits"locate the eye with the human body, with all its motility and sentience,"while relying on neither "scopic unity" nor"experiential chaos" (2002, 25). Similarly, the Kits distribute sensoryexperiences across media and through design. Their components do not add up orcohere, and the combined presence of assembled prototypes and contiguous partsgestures at possible paths through the material.
Ideally, these gestures remind audiences they are embodied,and that they make embodied decisions as they unpack and remember mediahistory. Such a reminder does more than lay bare the device. It encouragesparticipation or even intervention, which need not be framed romantically, assome authentic or transcendent experience (2002, 58-59). Instead, prototypingis simultaneously social and personal. As multiples anchored in everydaymaterials, the Kits highlight shared experiences: common assumptions about, forinstance, what art, craft, jewelry, technologies, culture, and history shoulddo or signify. As boxed anthologies prompting assembly, they stress differencesacross situations and settings. Interpretations of the prototypes willinevitably vary. Approaches to assembly will never be uniform. Criticisms ofthe Kits will emerge from an array of perspectives and pressure points.
Almost every tactile component in a Kit also exists as a 3-Dcomputer-aided design model (OBJ), a 3-D computer-aided manufacturing file(STL), and toolpath instructions for machining(G-code). Via GitHub, these files are circulatedonline for discovery, downloading, forking, editing, and fabrication. Thisapproach across formats and media means the Kits can be delivered online aswell as by post. It also means a single component can be replaced and expressedin a variety of materials, including wood, metal, acrylic, foam, plastic, andpaper. All files in a Kit carry a Creative Commons BY NC license. They can beshared and adapted in any medium or format assuming attribution is given andthe adapted material is not used for commercial purposes.
Some of these models are born-digital. For instance, allcomponents of a box may be designed in Rhinoceros 3-D and then cut with alaser. Other models are products of digitization. For example, parts of aprototype may be carved from wood and then measured using a structured-light 3-Dscanner, which outputs an object file viewable on a computer screen.
But the movement between bits and atoms is the mostinteresting aspect of modeling in the Kits. Digitized objects can be editedprior to fabrication. Surfaces can be smoothed, resolutions degraded, formsexploded, meshes decimated, and sizes altered, always with options to undo andautomate. Meanwhile, born-digital objects can be altered after fabrication, byboth hands and machines. They can be polished, stained, filed, filled, routed,glued, and joined. These changes in the material properties of a Kit'scomponents correspond with how they are perceived on and off screen. With theKits, audiences can observe how objects shift between material states: fromwood on a table to a model on a screen to instructions for a machine to acrylicin hand. Audiences can also note how certain states are conducive to particularmodes of perception. For instance, design software such as Rhinoceros 3-Daffords incredibly detailed views of objects that contain millions of polygons.Zooming in to see objects with such detail is not unlike using a microscope.
If Fluxkits complicate framedpieces on a wall, then the Kits for Cultural History complicate framed objectson a screen. Not only do they distribute their component parts through numerousformats and channels: the post, the online repository, the box, the file. They also demonstrate why media history is neverpurely digital, or never purely visual. It is multimodal and intermedial, an iterative process of this becoming that(Fuller 2005, 85).
Yet they are also explained, in part, by aguide accompanying a Kit's components. Somewhere between a grangerizedbook, a zine, and an academic essay, the guide isglued and stitched together. For immediate discovery, it is usually placeddirectly underneath the lid of a box. For circulation online, it is renderedinto a series of page images compiled in portable document format (PDF). Thecontent is handmade and xeroxed, with a collageaesthetic. It is also punctuated with keyword entries (Williams 1976). In thecase of an Early Wearable Kit, these keywords include "mourning," "gender,""miniature," "class," "performance," and "electromagnets." With referencesto primary and secondary source materials, each keyword situates early wearables in history and culture, detailing how they weremade, received, worn, exhibited, and articulated with social norms and culturalprotocols.
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